Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [299]
Sam was remembering the dreadful apathy which had settled over him after he had been raped in the bushes at the side of the Briggs Avenue Branch of the St Louis Library. Raped by a man who had called himself a policeman. That had been pretty undramatic, too. just a dirty trick, that was all it had been - a dirty, brainless trick played on a little kid by a man with serious mental problems. Sam supposed that, when you counted up the whole score, he ought to call himself lucky; the Library Cop might have killed him.
Ahead of them, the round white globes which marked the Junction City Public Library glimmered in the rain. Naomi said hesitantly, 'I think the real opposite of fear might be honesty. Honesty and belief. How does that sound?'
'Honesty and belief,' he said quietly, tasting the words. He squeezed the sticky ball of red licorice in his right hand. 'Not bad, I guess. Anyway, they'll have to do. We're here.'
6
The glimmering green numbers of the car's dashboard clock read 7:57. They had made it before eight after all.
'Maybe we better wait and make sure everybody's gone before we go around back,' she said.
'I think that's a very good idea.'
They cruised into an empty parking space across the street from the Library's entrance. The globes shimmered delicately in the rain. The rustle of the trees was a less delicate thing; the wind was still gaining strength. The oaks sounded as if they were dreaming, and all the dreams were bad.
At two minutes past eight, a van with a stuffed Garfield cat and a mom's TAXI sign in its rear window pulled up across from them. The horn honked, and the Library's door - looking less grim even in this light than it had on Sam's first visit to the Library, less like the mouth in the head of a vast granite robot - opened at once. Three kids, junior-high-schoolers by the look of them, came out and hurried down the steps. As they ran down the walk to MOM'S TAXI, two of them pulled their jackets up to shield their heads from the rain. The van's side door rumbled open on its track, and the kids piled into it. Sam could hear the faint sound of their laughter, and envied the sound. He thought about how good it must be to come out of a library with laughter in your mouth. He had missed that experience, thanks to the man in the round black glasses.
Honesty, he thought. Honesty and belief. And then he thought again: The fine is paid. The fine is paid, goddammit. He ripped open the last two packages of licorice and began kneading their contents into his sticky, nasty-smelling red ball. He glanced at the rear of MOM'S TAXI as he did so. He could see white exhaust drifting up and tattering in the windy air. Suddenly he began to realize what he was up to here.
'Once, when I was in high school,' he said, 'I watched a bunch of kids play a prank on this other kid they didn't like. In those days, watching was what I did best. They took a wad of modelling clay from the Art Room and stuffed it in the tailpipe of the kid's Pontiac. You know what happened?'
She glanced at him doubtfully. 'No - what?'
'Blew the muffler off in two pieces,' he said. 'One on each side of the car. They flew like shrapnel. The muffler was the weak point, you see. I suppose if the gases had backflowed all the way to the engine, they might have blown the cylinders right out of the block.'
'Sam, what are you talking about?'
'Hope,' he said. 'I'm talking about hope. I guess the honesty and belief have to come a little later.'
Mom's TAXI pulled away from the curb, its headlights spearing through the silvery lines of rain.
The green numbers on Naomi's dashboard clock read 8:06 when the Library's front door opened again. A man and a woman came out. The man, awkwardly buttoning his overcoat with an umbrella tucked under his arm, was unmistakably Richard Price; Sam knew him at once,